When Cameron still said nothing, Silas cocked his head. “I need you to be a team-player on this, Cameron. Is that understood?”
Oh, she understood all right. Silas was selling her out—letting her take the fall for his decision to back off of Martino. But that was how the game was played. He was her boss, not to mention an extremely important and well-connected member of the Chicago legal community. Which meant there was only one thing she could say.
“Consider it done.”
JACK WATCHED AS Wilkins checked his rearview mirror. The passenger in the backseat had been silent for a while.
“Is she asleep?” he asked.
Wilkins nodded. “Been a long night.”
“True. Let’s pick up another round of coffee before heading back. The stuff they have in the office tastes like shit.”
“I meant that it’s been a long night for her.”
Jack knew exactly what Wilkins had meant. But he was trying to avoid thinking about her as much as possible.
“Kind of strange, the two of you meeting again under these circumstances.”
Wilkins apparently had not received his let’s-just-drop-the-issue memo.
Jack glanced in his mirror to double-check that Cameron was sleeping. “It would’ve been strange no matter what circumstances we’d met under,” he said, keeping his voice low.
Wilkins looked away from the road. “You have any regrets?”
“About what I said?”
“Yeah.”
“Only that they had a camera there.”
Wilkins shook his head. “Remind me to never get on your bad side.”
“Don’t ever get on my bad side.”
“Thanks.”
Jack liked working with Wilkins. He’d hesitated at first when his boss had decided to partner him with a guy who’d just graduated from the Academy. He’d hesitated even more when he’d gotten a look at the expensive suit Wilkins had been wearing the first day they met. But underneath the grins and jokes, Wilkins was a lot savvier than Jack had first given him credit for, and he respected that—even if the two of them couldn’t have been more different in their approach to most things. Besides that, Jack welcomed having a partner who actually talked for a change, considering his last partner in Nebraska had spoken an average of about six-point-three words a day and had the personality of a doorknob. Stakeouts with the guy had been a real hoot. Not that stakeouts in Nebraska were all that interesting to start with. He’d been bored out of his mind the last three years—which, of course, had been the whole point of the disciplinary action the Department of Justice had taken against him.
Jack glanced again in his mirror to check out Cameron sleeping in the backseat.
He wasn’t being entirely truthful, telling Wilkins that he had no regrets about what had happened three years ago. Of course he did—what he said had been uncalled for. He knew that all of about two seconds after the words had flown out of his mouth.
When he’d found out that he was being transferred back to Chicago, he’d vowed to put everything behind him. Unfortunately, he hadn’t counted on running into Cameron Lynde within his first week of being back. Being around her brought back a lot of old memories.
For starters, he still couldn’t forget the way she had refused to look at him the day she told him about the Martino case.
Late that Friday afternoon, three years ago, Cameron had called to say she was coming to his office to speak with him and his partner at the time, Joe Dobbs. When he had heard the knock and seen her standing in his doorway, he’d smiled. Jack distinctly remembered that, probably because of how rare it was that he smiled back in those days—there hadn’t been a lot to be chipper about during the two years he’d worked for Martino. He was still, to put it bluntly, pretty fucked-up from being undercover for so long and having trouble getting back into the routine of normal life. He also wasn’t sleeping at night, and that certainly didn’t help matters.
But as much as he had been finding it difficult to transition back to an office job, there was one part of it he didn’t mind: working with Cameron Lynde. He’d begun to worry, in fact, that he was starting to not mind it a little too much. They’d only ever talked business—the Martino case—yet the couple of times they’d been alone together, he felt some sort of undercurrent between them. He didn’t know how to describe it, except to say that whatever the undercurrent was, it was enough to make him wish he wasn’t still so